


guillotine

by arbitrarily



Category: Now You See Me (Movies)
Genre: Breathplay, F/M, Infidelity, Post-Canon, Rope Bondage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:29:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7279216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isn't that what she's always looking for: a man willing to cut her in half.</p>
            </blockquote>





	guillotine

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently my brain shut off while watching this movie at the scene when Daniel tied Lula's hands, and so, here we are. Mind the tags; everything is consensual, though debatable how sane or safe.

 

 

The problem with magicians is they excel at breaking and entering. It’s not the only problem, but right now it’s her biggest one. 

Lula kicks the front door to her apartment closed behind her.

“I see you, man. You can stop with the skulking and the shadows and the.” Lula runs out of words and instead shakes her hands in the air like a rattled but excited ghost.

“You can only see me because I want you to see me. Think about that,” Danny says, but he steps into the minimal light pouring in through the open window all the same. 

Lula braces her hands on her hips, rolls her eyes. Her clothes are stiff but have dried since their near death escape via Venetian canal. She spent the entire flight in soaking wet clothes, bickering with anyone who lacked the common sense to avoid her. So, Merritt, primarily. Daniel had passed the flight in uncustomary silence, and that right there should’ve been her first sign she was in some real trouble. 

And now – Lula finds Daniel in her admittedly shitty studio apartment in Brooklyn. He’s still looking at her all expectantly, like he deserves both a pat on the back and a slap in the face, somehow managing to make lurking a skill worth Grade A world-class douchbaggery. 

A job gone bad. That’s the newest point of contention between them, though hardly the lone or the last. She hadn’t really expected it, the growing pains with them, working for The Eye. They’re all still technically fugitives – that technicality being an arrest warrant in each of their names; the whole Robin Hood vigilantism only goes so far when you’ve (or, rather, Dylan has) made the FBI feel like a bunch of assholes. New Year’s on the Thames was six months ago, and in that time a restlessness had begun to rattle the five of them as they sought out new scores to settle, as Daniel tried to adopt the leadership mantle he believed so rightly belonged to him. If Lula had to admit to admiring anything about Daniel, she supposes it would probably be that: utter certainty about his own abilities. Sure, there might be some delusions of grandeur poisoning that well, but that must be fucking awesome to believe you, yourself, are fucking awesome at everything, and then, the most magical part of all, people actually fall in line to respect you and remind you. Tell you how fucking awesome you are.

Because that’s the real grist of Lula’s own restlessness these days: she just can’t get any goddamn respect. 

Exhibit A: Daniel doesn’t take any of her ideas for new acts seriously. Like, for example, Atlas Shrugged, whereby through the power of Magic™, Daniel would do a grand service to all of humankind by revealing who in the audience is a fan of Ayn Rand.

Exhibit B through Z: she doesn’t have that kind of time to list.

But it’s been six months, and she still doesn’t quite feel like she’s part of the crew. Her entry into their ranks was done so quickly, with so little fanfare, and so much happened immediately after she met them, and then. Boom. She’s supposed to be one of them, even though a lot of the time she feels like she’s nothing more than The Girl, or, even worse, Jack’s Girl. The Magician’s Assistant. 

She flips the light switch. One of the bulbs in the ceiling fixture sizzles and pops, coincidentally leaving Daniel’s corner of the room in shadow. 

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Daniel says, glancing around the dingy apartment, his tone his usual sardonic dismissal. Lula looks around, takes the place in through his eyes and can’t help the inward wince. Her apartment is lived-in, if only in the sense that she’s hardly the neatest person in the world and she’s accumulated a lot of clutter over the years. “I see you really bring that charm of yours everywhere you go.”

Her apartment isn’t very big and it isn’t very nice. She has money now. That’s not really a problem. The whole Horsemen thing is pretty lucrative when you’re not living as a fugitive or running from Angry Men With Guns And A Vendetta. She could easily afford a better place. Multiple places, at that. But. Well, but. There’s a part of her that is still having one hell of a hard time trusting any of this. Any of them. Call it a defense mechanism. Call it survival tactics they don’t teach the Girl Scouts. She hoards her money away – in cash, in stocks, in safety deposit boxes under obvious pseudonyms like Eleanor Rigby or Eliza Doolittle or Elaine Benes, in off-shore accounts she spent the better part of a weekend educating herself about and then the better part of a month harassing some hedge-fund guy who’s wallet she stole.

The point is: there’s no safety net with a job like this. So she kept her apartment. So she pays her rent in cash. She invents names and identities for herself like a spy or a celebrity or a call girl and crashes in non-penthouse hotel rooms. 

“Were you hiding behind the bookshelf just to compliment me on my housekeeping?” she asks.

“You know you’ve got magazines back there from 2007?”

“They’re historical documents.”

His mouth twitches but he doesn’t say anything. 

He watches her carefully, hawkish, as if nothing in this apartment exists outside his express permission. God, of course a magician would make for a textbook control freak: they are trying to prove the laws of physics are beneath them.

She stifles a yawn, distracts herself from the increasing discomfort between them.

“Dude. I’m fucking wrecked. I am in no mood. Say your piece, put your dukes up, whatever. Out with it. Or, you know. Get out.”

Daniel’s pretty wrecked looking, too. He doesn’t have a shiner, not yet, but there’s a reddened scrape under his eye, some slight swelling, an angry looking cut across the bridge of his nose. There’s a blossoming bruise along the underside of his jaw. She looks pretty good next to him – but, hey, when isn’t that the case.

He doesn’t answer her. She’s not sure how much of that is an interrogation tactic meant to draw her out and fill the silence with a whole lot of words she may or may not mean (he knows her too well; this is not the first time she’s thought that) or if he is merely gathering a lengthy catalog of evidence to use against her.

Here’s what had happened: they fucked up. The less said the better. They had culminated their own mini-triathalon of low-stakes feats of theft-based magic in Venice. Monte Carlo had gone well enough and so had Dubai, but Venice. Venice was _yikes_ (words she recalls most definitely saying after finding herself handcuffed to a decidedly pissed and roughed-up J. Daniel Atlas).

Here’s what happened: Lula had opened her (big) mouth. And you know what else happened? She got them out of there alive. Alive, and sometimes with this crew, that’s the most unlikely feat of all. 

“Look, I know what you’re thinking,” she finally says, caving just like she knew she would, arms held out and open, peace treaty-style.

“Oh, you do, do you? Merritt’s been teaching you the awesome scope of his powers?”

She squints. “Nope. No, not exactly. Or at all. I just meant it in the way most normal people mean in confrontational conversations. Like this one. I know what you’re thinking! You’re mad at me!”

“Bravo,” he says. “Gonna tell me how many fingers I’m holding up behind my back. I’ll give you a hint,” he says and flips her off. She ignores him, frowns a little.

“How’d you get here so fast anyway. We were on the same flight, man. You Uber? I bet you Ubered.”

It’s his turn to ignore her. “You and I have a problem,” he finally says. If she had to admit to liking anything else about Daniel (not that that’s a real challenge or anything; she's pretty open with her admiration of him, or she was, at first) it’s how clear and concise he talks. Everything he says has that rapid-fire machine gun rat-a-tat of unmuddied idea and direction. She envies that.

“Yeah, dude. You’re all that’s standing between me and my bed.”

“I don’t find you cute,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard her. There’s no real hardness or cruelty to his voice; he says it merely as a fact, the same way she might say _I can’t drink orange juice without gagging_ or _I never did watch_ Breaking Bad _but it’s too late to pretend otherwise_ or _my driver’s license expired three months ago_. “I never wanted you in the Horsemen,” he says with that same detached certainty.

“Believe me. I know,” she snaps. Despite herself, she can feel her temper start to stir. It’s really hot in her apartment, open window and everything. She knows she generally comes across as super cool and super chill, and she is, probably. For the most part. But holy shit if she doesn’t Hulk out from time to time, and Daniel’s definitely and deliberately walking straight up to the line.

“I had everything under control,” he’s saying. “I knew exactly what we needed to do, but nope! Here you come. With a brand new plan all your own.”

“That was you with everything under control? Well smack my ass and call me Pony Boy.”

He frowns, his entire head jerking with it. “What? What does that even? That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a thing.”

“It’s not. I had it under control.”

“It is, and you didn’t.” She pauses. “Look,” she tries again. “I don’t know if it’s because it was Henley who left and it was me who swooped in and snagged that Lady Godiva Horsemen seat at the Round Table – ”

“Christ, the number of mixed metaphors alone,” he mutters.

“But I’m not the reason Henley left. You don’t have to take it out on me. I can be valuable.” She hates the unsure sound of her voice as she stumbles over the last part. It sounds like the world’s saddest closing line for a job interview. A job interview for a job she already has, his dissent regardless.

Daniel’s frown is dangerous. Lula knows that. He’s gone from generalized angry, an angry that encompasses a great many things that just so happen to include her, to the personal – heat-seeking missile-directed ice-cold fury. Aimed straight at her.

“Henley has nothing to do with this. Or with you.”

She shrugs. “Okay. Maybe you just don’t like women then, huh?”

“Maybe it’s not a gender-wide discrimination. Maybe I just don’t like you.”

“Well now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings.”

There’s still a fair amount of distance between the two of them. And you know what? She has no idea what Daniel is hoping to achieve by ambushing her in her own apartment. Does he want her resignation? An apology? Because he might as well head home – he’s not getting either of those things from her. Not tonight. Hell, probably not ever. 

Or does he just want to fight. There’s been blood in the water between them since before Venice, if she wants to be honest. Before Dubai and before Monte Carlo. Before New Years’ on the Thames. From the start. They’ve been circling each other from the moment they met each other. And she flushes a little, glad for the poor lighting. Because of the two of them, she was the one foolish enough to bare her throat and assume that he, and the rest of them, would not let it snap. That they would not drop the blade down on her. 

Daniel did not reciprocate. 

“You don’t trust me, do you,” she finally says, quiet, any trace of humor gone.

“Do you trust me?” He asks it like her answer is a foregone conclusion.

The question knocks her further off her game. Because the truth is now she doesn’t really know. She had assumed she did, that she must have. That she had trusted them – him, by extension – with her life, but that had felt reflexive, as if there was nothing to lose that hadn’t already been lost. That her life was something to be traded, that it wasn’t worth all that much. The threats were always supposed to be external, from other people. Not from one of them.

“So, is that our problem then?” she asks, letting her mouth go mean.

“That,” he says, considering her, “and that I am really fucking mad at you.”

His hands curl at his sides and something in that gesture sets her off.

She stalks forward, watches the way he watches her. 

“You’d hit a girl?” she goads him. His face is right there, snarling too close to hers, and she never really took the time to look at him, like this. He’s all sharp edges, bladed cheekbones, a bony kaleidoscope of angles and length: long chin, long nose, sunken cheeks, closely cropped hair, all skull. With his black coat on despite the summer weather he looks like some harbinger of death and destruction, not that she’d ever admit that to him.

“You’re not a girl,” he hisses, and she smiles big and toothsome. It’s the closest he has ever come to admitting they are equals. It's all the warning she gets.

He’s an idiot: he tries to use her own tricks against her. He lunges for her, tries to get her hands tied again, like when they first met. Lula laughs, maniacal and cruel and supervillain-y as she easily slips away from him, the length of rope familiar and right in her own calloused hands. “Really?” She swings the rope once, his eyes following it. 

She whips that same rope and her eyes widen, impressed with herself as she lassos him like she’s Wonder Woman and he’s someone who gets lassoed. She laughs out loud. “Holy shit, I didn’t think that’d work.” They’re totally gonna have to use that on stage some time.

Daniel twists to no avail, dropped to his knees. His jaw clenches. “As wildly amusing as this is for you, I’d gratefully appreciate you untying me.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t think so, buddy. I think I’ve got your right where I want you.”

“Trussed up on the floor of your truly disgusting apartment?” He squirms; she likes it.

“I’m not sure why you’re saying that like that’s a thing I totally wouldn’t want.” She's also not sure why her voice has dropped that much lower, accidentally almost seductive. Lula approaches him until she’s standing over him. Something flickers across his face before it goes stoic and tight again. She wonders what the view’s like from down there. She imagines it’s all boots, thigh-boots and leg, anything worth seeing shadowed under her too-tight skirt. Damn, she totally could’ve made a career out of dominatrix-ing. Probably doesn’t pay as well as High Stakes High Profile High Crimes Magician-ing, but it’s good to have a back-up plan.

Daniel’s stopped moving but there’s an obvious threat in how he’s looking up at her. Something turns over in her gut – like the first stab at a never performed trick, well-aware of how much disaster waits with a single misstep. 

In that moment, what she wants more than anything is to see that iron control broken down. She wants him to stick his neck out. She wants them to be equals.

“Get up,” she says, voice still low. She must give something away in her eyes because he swallows, the bob of his throat distracting. 

And he does: he clumsily rises to his feet, his arms still bound at his sides. With her boots on, she’s close to his height. It’s easy to look him in the eye.

“You know what our problem really is?” He’s so close to her, he’s right there, he’s watching her with tense suspicion, like he’s expecting her to latch out at any moment. “We never had a new employee orientation. No ice breakers. We didn’t sit down in a circle and name our hometowns or our favorite colors. No trust falls or getting to know yous.”

His face has dipped down into a frown but his gaze is still tight on her face. “I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do,” she says. She pauses, waits for his interruption but it never comes. “You’re going to listen and you’re going to do exactly what I’m going to say.”

Daniel’s mouth twists meanly. “And then? We’ll be the best of friends?”

“Get on the bed,” Lula says. 

You want proof of magic? He obeys.

 

 

 

Here is what happens when you have two people trying to teach each other a lesson: no one learns much of anything at all.

Lula gets his shirt off before she ties him down. Quick sleight of hand that leaves his mouth twisted in a suppressed grin. “The perks of getting a magician in bed, huh.” 

“Pretty sure I ripped it. You’ll have to find something else to wear out of here. Lots of sequins in my closet,” she says, mouth near his ear, teeth barely a scrape but she catches the twitch in his neck. That’s interesting.

Also interesting: there is a truly insane amount of tension between them. It's unclear to her if it's the pathetic aborted attempt at a fight or if it's Venice or if it's just him, but his mouth is parted open a little, expectation obvious and tight in his face, and looking down at him she realizes there are a great many things she’d like to do to him. 

Okay, so full disclosure? Lula doesn’t have an endgame in mind here. Well, she kind of does, but admitting it, even to herself, makes her feel dirty in both a good way and a terrible way. Stress relief, she tells herself. A bastardized and perverted exercise in stress relief. That’s what this starts as. Lula’s always been very good at being able to justify any scenario to herself. A moral contortionist. Able to twist anything as necessary, even and especially if it’s not. Even if it’s only because she wanted it.

She ties his arms to the bedpost, impossibly quick work he doesn’t even compliment her on. Instead, his legs kick out, testing her. Lula grabs him by the ankle, lets her nails bite into the bare skin under the cuff of his pants. “We can tie those down too,” she says to him, amused tone undercut by dark threat. He goes lax and still, but there’s something about his face that tells her that he would like that. Who knew – J. Daniel Atlas is far more interesting than she ever thought to give him credit for. He's a regular Walt fucking Whitman in all his multitude-containing.

She watches Daniel strain against the rope and there’s something super weirdly hot about that. He’s laid out, all skinny and smart-mouthed; he's got a boyish build that makes him look young and if it wasn’t for his flat mouth and sharp eyes, she’d almost be tempted to call him vulnerable.

“What are you doing?” he finally asks.

She sits on the edge of the bed, can feel his knee pressed against her hip, and she clumsily pulls her boots off. His mocking gaze is on her as they drop to the floor with a thud. Lula looks at him over her shoulder.

“You, Danny, are a control freak. You don’t trust me. I think we need to change that.”

Daniel doesn’t reply; all he does is glare at her and flex his hands. She knows he’s a lot stronger than he looks, both from experience and from he way the bed frame is whining each time he tests the strength of the knots she tied. They both know he’s never been very good at getting a knot untied. She smirks down at him; hey, can’t be good at everything. 

Lula is very good at tying knots.

He pulls again, rope biting into his wrists. “Why knots?” he asks, the words scratchy as if his throat is dry.

“I have learned,” she says slowly, straddling them, watches the muscles of his stomach leap, that same know-it-all tone every single one of these Horsemen adopt on the stage, treat as a birthright, “in my many travels and travails, that men love little more than watching a woman twist on a hook.” She widens her eyes at him.

“Sure, like a fish.”

She cocks her head. “Sure,” she repeats. She pulls her shirt over her head. Her hair is messy, falls in her face. Her black bra is mostly sheer and she’ll admit it: it’s gratifying the way he’s looking at her. Her fingers curl against his scalp; she wishes he had hair to pull. She tilts his head, makes him look up at her face instead of her tits. “It’s like that one Alfred Hitchcock quote,” she drops her voice, “‘torture the women!’’”

“He didn’t sound like that.”

“Oh, fuck you, that’s not the point.”

“You learned to tie yourself up because men like to see tortured women,” he says.

“Tied up, beheaded, dismembered – you name it, I’ve tired it.” She nudges forward with her thigh, his dick hard and right there. She arches an eyebrow.

“I think it’s worth noting I am, in fact, the party currently tied up.”

She nudges forward again. His teeth clack together, a tic of the muscle at the hinge of his jaw. “Not the only thing worth noting,” she says.

“Is this your idea of a peace treaty?” he asks, his hips shifting just barely but enough for her to notice. “Fucking?”

It wasn’t, honestly, it wasn’t. She just wanted to show him what she was made of, show him she’s a trustworthy person, worthy of his trust. The fucking now just seems kinda like the most obvious next step. 

“Don’t make me have to gag that pretty mouth,” she says instead, the self-parody thick, even as her finger drags his plump bottom lip down. Daniel’s eyes are bright, glint at the suggestion. She could laugh. God, she bets he’s the sort who’d love nothing more than to be wrapped shoulder-to-toe, King Tut mummy-style in rope or chains, completely immobile, completely at the mercy of another – all outside his power. Nothing he can do about anything that comes next. Control freaks love that kind of shit. She can just imagine it: him, all tied up. Her, astride his face. She almost kisses him. 

She doesn’t. She gets his pants off instead. Daniel’s cock’s already hard, which is super awesome, and all it takes is her fingers wrapped around him for him to bite off the word, “ _Fuck_ ,” equal parts curse and command.

He never mentions Jack. So neither does she. She’s not sure if it’s better or worse that neither of them thinks to mention him. It’s almost like they’ve had a silent conversation on this and reached the same conclusion: there is something awful that only the two of them can give each other and this is it. 

Daniel’s fingers twitch when she takes her skirt off, her panties along with it, bare to him. Naked. Like he wants to touch her. He won’t let himself say it out loud, ask for it. Even though she threatened to gag him, Lula’s found she doesn’t like him quiet. Seems wrong somehow. She’s used to him running his mouth, his words crashing into each other as he plows ahead, cocksure and arrogant. 

“Where are you going?” he asks. There’s an anxious uptick in his tone, and she likes that. She likes the sweat that’s started to pool in the hollow of his throat, her own skin sticky. The air conditioner in her apartment doesn't work; the radiator is busted too: much like the tenant of this apartment, it operates as feast or famine, the season irrelevant. 

She looks at him over her shoulder. “Condom?” she says, yanking the bedside drawer open. She just as quickly vaults back onto the bed, astride him, the foil wrapper flicking between her fingers, passed lightning quick from hand to hand. “Don’t really wanna wake up tomorrow – presto! bammo! gonorrhea!”

“I don’t have,” he starts and then he stops, his eyes flicking as she keeps passing the condom between her fingers, foil flashing in the minimal light. “You make that appear behind my ear or my balls, and I’m leaving.”

She leans forward, presses her bare breasts to his chest, and gives a good yank on the knot keeping his right wrist pinned to the bedpost. He exhales noisily through his nose. “Are you now?”

She can't help but tease him before she fucks herself down on him. God, she’s wet. “What do you want?” she asks.

He’s breathing hard. He doesn’t say anything though, his nostrils flaring. 

She smears herself over him, bites down on the inside of her bottom lip. He tips his head back. “What do you want?” she asks again.

“Fuck me,” she hears him say, quiet and furious, tiny shifts of his hips under her. His heels skid against the bedspread, trying to get some traction against her. So she holds him down, her fingers biting into the harsh cut of his hip.

“What’s that? I can’t hear you?”

“Shut the fuck up and fuck me.” Impatient and demanding, but it’s there, buried in a mouth full of grit: a hint of a whine. The thing she wanted to hear from him: he’s begging for it.

Lula ducks her head, her hair falling in her face, her mouth falling open, as she slides down onto him. It feels good. Better than good. She breathes hard, his body taut under her hands; she can feel his stomach flexing as he sucks in a loud breath. His own hands are curled into ineffective fists above, his face detailing both his frustration and want.

She rides him slow at first, like she’s in no hurry. She can feel his anxious restlessness, like it’s a third person in the room with them. He won’t give her the satisfaction of telling her what he wants, what he needs. Faster, harder. Nothing. 

Lula would be disappointed if she wasn’t actually getting really into it, and that’s like admitting something terrible to herself. Her entire body tightens at the quiet grunts from Daniel, how he plants his feet to get better leverage and starts snapping his hips up into her. He knocks a choked-out groan from her, her fingers digging into his chest. She leans forward, the angle better, his cock hitting her just right with each snap of his hips. She grounds down against him, drops her head because this suddenly feels too personal, too intimate, and she doesn’t want him to see her face. She doesn’t want to give away that trick.

It’s then – her head low and eyes unfocused – that he makes his move. 

He breaks the knots she tied, and he moves fast. He gets her on her knees, a surprised laugh punched out of her that quickly bleeds into something uglier when he draws her arms up behind her back; the angle makes her shoulders scream out in pain and she tries to drag herself up on her knees, her thighs wet. She was right, she thinks dimly, turning her head into the bedspread, trying to glance at him over her wrenched shoulder. He always has to be in charge. Daniel’s breathing harshly; “Torture the woman, huh?” he says. The rope he twines around her already raw wrists makes her wince, gnash her teeth, and she squirms under him, hiding her grin.

He ties a terrible knot. He’s learned nothing from her.

He fucks back into her, his mouth wet and open at her shoulder; he’s noisier like this, his groans long and full and broken.

Lula gets her hands free quick and easy, a throaty triumphant laugh and the words, “ta-da!” barely out of her mouth before he has the rope around her neck. It’s like her brain shorts out for a second and she’s aware of only two things: the spasming of her throat and his cock between her legs. She hears a wheezing groan and realizes it’s her. That only makes her suck in a harsher, shorter breath. Daniel keeps fucking her from behind, choking her, a garrote of her own rope pulled tight around her throat. 

She makes this low moan in her throat that gets stuck, comes out gasping and panicky, pained sounding, and the rope slackens around her throat immediately. Daniel stills. Lula slumps to the bed from the sudden lack of opposition. “No,” she says, that same thready, desperate noise, her hair in her face as she drops her weight forward, her hands flat on the bedspread and then curling. “Tighter,” she says, and then, “fuck me.”

He does. He hauls her body back against his, her legs splayed open uncomfortably, knees slick and slipping until he lifts her higher, her thighs draped over his. Daniel is breathing hard and ragged in her ear, the rope tight again, itchy and coarse around the thin skin of her throat. He keeps the rope pulled one-handed and just taut enough, her breath cut off and then permitted, cut off and then permitted – no regular rhythm to it, no way for her to predict when he’ll pull it against her. There’s a point to be found somewhere in that, she’s pretty sure of it, but she’s so close to coming and she’ll wear a reddened ring around her neck marked by him tomorrow, she’s so close, she’ll need another demonstration.

Jack likes to tell her she has a lot to learn about trusting other people. Jack trusts with an open unbruised eagerness commonly found in dogs and small children. It’s both her most and least favorite things about him. Jack would never fuck her like this – like he wants to hurt her, like he wants to break her in half. Saw her in half and be the only one in the room with the power to put her back together again. 

Her hands reach blindly for Daniel, clawing at his forearm, dragging along his face. She can’t take a full breath in, isn’t she sure could even without the rope – he’s fucking her so deep, relentless and quick. She’s pretty sure she’s babbling, but it’s like her ears are stuffed with cotton and she can’t hear a goddamn thing. She can feel his teeth though, his wet mouth at her ear, her neck her jaw, she thinks he might be saying something too, but it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because she’s there, clenching and coming around him, breath whistling, chest seizing, her entire body alight. Like she could disappear. Like she already has.

Like she doesn’t need to worry – he will bring her back. 

Daniel pulls out and rolls her to her back while she makes these fish-on-dry-land gasping sounds. He pulls the condom off, finishes himself onto her stomach, and it’s then that he kisses her. It’s a parody of a kiss. All teeth and tongue, their lips touching only as afterthought or consequence.

 

 

 

They lay next to each other, naked, the rope forgotten and dropped on the bed beside them.

“You know what I hate?” she says, lazily raising her hand and knocking it against his shoulder. “That you guys have to reveal the trick. Every time. Like, you have to make sure everyone knows how fucking clever you are. Really robs some of the charm from the whole experience, you know?”

“Says the girl with a drawer full of fake severed arms.” She turns her head quick to look at him. He shrugs, his shoulder bumping into her arm. “I was snooping.”

She stretches, her entire body sore. “The audience should be able to trust the trick,” she says, slow. “Trust the magician. Trust what they are seeing, whether they believe it or not.”

A long beat passes, the only noise the street below. “You think trust is a necessary element of magic?” Daniel asks. For once, there’s no snide undertone to his words. Instead, he sounds tired but genuinely curious.

Lula’s fingers trace the width of her throat. The skin is tender, burnt from the rope.

She doesn’t need to look at his face when she replies. “For most things,” she says. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


End file.
